The Irish Times reports that the Cardinal’s boycott was alluded to in passing at Saturday night’s dinner during a speech made by former Massachusetts senator Paul Kirk as he introduced PM Kenny.

Kirk said: “Enda Kenny had courageously used his bully pulpit to speak the unvarnished but necessary and inconvenient truth to the highest institutions of religious power on the fundamental issues of honesty, transparency, accountability and social justice.”

The comments from Kirk drew applause from the Boston crowd.

In a nod to history, Kenny received a framed copy of President Kennedy’s handwritten note of the poem River Shannon, which the president read before his departure from Shannon on his famous visit to Ireland in June 1963.

President Kennedy took note of the poem when Irish President Eamon de Valera’s wife Sinead recited it to him at a dinner the previous evening.

The report says that after reading the poem at Shannon, President Kennedy promised to return to Ireland the following spring. He was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963.

Amongst the attendance at Saturday night’s dinner was Vicki Kennedy, the widow of the late senator Teddy Kennedy, President Kennedy’s brother; Irish Ambassador to the US Michael Collins; US congresswoman Niki Tsongas; Massachusetts House of Representatives member Linda Dorcena Forry; and secretary of state of the commonwealth of Massachusetts William Galvin.

PM Kenny will lay a wreath on Sunday at the temporary memorial in Boston for the victims of the marathon bombings.